Xi'an and Beyond

'Lo again. We arrived in Xi'an after a nice 6 hour coach journey, accompanied by some annoying American hippies. Xi'an is a lot bigger than I thought and kinda wish I had set aside more time for it. We stayed for 2 days where we managed excursions to see the Terracotta Warriors and the panda reserve. The Terracotta's were awesome to see up close. You go around 3 excavation pits, which are the different sites of which the archeologists are still digging about. I got an audio tour and it was really interesting to hear about the different types of soldiers, weapons, etc, and also the theories as to what happened at the site. Xi'an itself is quite a bustling city and therefore isn't as cheap as some of the places we've been. But the room was good and only cost a few quid and we managed to eat at street stalls and stuff so we got by spending very little.

The panda reserve was a must see for us. We probably wont get to see any other panda's since we're missing out Chengdu (Wulong Panda Reserve) and don't particularly want to go to the zoo's. It was quite expensive but not too much more than our budget allows for, and we really wanted to see the pandas. There were other animals there as well, not that I can put names to most of them. But they had some birds of prey, black bears, red panda's, some weird things that look like the animals in Star Wars... but we weren't able to cut them open and sleep inside.

We caught the sleeper train to Chongqoing last night and arrived around 10am. We met our handy helper John, who has allowed us to hang about in his hostel, shower, internet and that. He's also helped us for tickets for our next bit. The Yangste River cruise. We have 4 days on the river and seeing the little Three Gorges.

That's it for now. Keep in touch.